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wireless
technology and expertise won't automatically lead to 4G dominance.

4G strategies must be different than 3G strategies, targeting a
market, a specific solution or a competitive differentiator.

Yankee Group
Early 4G Leaders and Followers report

4G strategies must be
different than 3G strategies, targeting a market, a specific solution or a competitive point in
order to build brand awareness among users, particularly because almost 75% of users don't know
what 4G is and deployments will be spotty for a while.

Yankee Distinguished Research Fellow Chris Nicoll drew his conclusions from a combination of
Yankee Group consumer surveys, vendor discussions and Rethink
Technology surveys of nearly 200 operators worldwide. The report categorizes operators into
leaders, followers and those "on the bubble," depending on their business decisions and execution
in the next six-to-12 months.

Yankee's picks for early 4G leadership in three global areas are as follows:

Asia-Pacific: Japan's KDDI and South Korea's KT -- for their WiMAX and LTE
deployments.

U.S.: Clearwire for its WiMAX rollout, MetroPCS for LTE and T-Mobile for HSPA+.

Europe: TeliaSonera.

So where's Verizon Wireless? Nicoll ranks Verizon Wireless in his "on the bubble" category
because it is lagging the leaders in its 4G LTE deployment, even though it has announced an
aggressive rollout plan for the rest of this year. Nicoll sees Verizon moving into a leadership
position in the U.S. by the end of 2011, however, even though it will trail Clearwire until 2012.
Joining Verizon "on the bubble" are Sprint, LightSquared, China Mobile and Telefonica.

Landing in the dreaded "followers" category, where Yankee sends operators that are slower to
develop 4G strategies or have had challenges integrating past technology decisions, are AT&T,
Telenor and Vodafone.

Addressing the marketing challenge for 4G wireless operators

Customer awareness will be one of the major challenges for 4G wireless operators in 2011, Nicoll
said, because they need to figure out how to position their 4G networks against their own 3G
networks,

as well as against competitors. In the early days,
differentiation will likely be recognized through 4G devices wireless (including data cards and
dongles), but the lines will blur as more 4G handsets hit the market.

Operators need to get beyond the speed and price discussion with customers and market the
"experience" enabled by 3G and 4G, historically a difficult jump. Operators that tie their
marketing messages to third-party services will see the most improvement, Nicoll said, and average revenue
per user will improve due to the ability to charge add-on rates for services like mobile
TV.

To move the 4G business model along, Yankee suggests that operators focus their early 4G
services on a specific market solution or a point of competitive differentiation to create a
specific identity with customers. Backing up Yankee's point, some wireless operators have already
started building 4G solutions for vertical markets like health care or manufacturing.

HSPA+ technology positioned for a few great years

Another confusing 4G issue for customers is that operators have three different technology
options: HSPA+, LTE and WiMAX. Customers don't know the difference, much less whether there is any
device portability among them.

HSPA+ will be a viable alternative to LTE for the next few years, according to Yankee. HSPA+ is
already operational in almost 30 European networks that report speeds of up to 21 Mbps. LTE's
40-50 Mbps speeds in Sweden easily surpass that, but HSPA+ beats some LTE test speeds (like
Verizon's Boston 700 MHz test, with unofficial speeds of about 8.5 Mbps), the report said.

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